I’ve been aware of Linux for a long time as an alternative to Microsoft Windows but only installed it a few years ago when I was looking to experiment with a telephone server.

My encounters with it since have been more frequent and now that I am in a position to upgrade XP to Vista I intend to abandon Bill’s new OS (that I’ve heard little good about) and switch over to Linus’s alternative.

The purpose of this post is to highlight the reasons for the migration and to give food for thought to whoever may be considering the switch. (more…)

If you’ve ever provided over-the-phone computer support for a computer novice (partner, friend, relative, colleague) , you probably know how frustrating it can be when you spend 5 minutes describing where ‘the button’ is you want the other party to click.

I recently needed to provide remote assistance for someone overseas. The person was running Windows XP and had limited computer knowledge. I found out that they had Hamachi installed and so I used Netmeeting (comes installed with XP) to take control of their mouse and keyboard.

Here are the steps for anyone that wants to provide remote assistance using a secure method. (more…)

It’s ironic, that having installed and trialed so many flowcharting solutions, my tool of choice was already installed on my laptop and I didn’t even know it.

Like most people, I used to think of Excel as just a spreadsheet package. However, as I’m going to show you in this guide, it trounces other expensive flowcharting solutions and is now my favourite flowchart software. Let me tell you why; (more…)

The original Secure-Admin plugin supported only Private SSL. This meant if you wanted to secure your Wordpress login and administration pages you needed to purchase and setup a Private SSL certificate from a certificate authority and a dedicated IP address from your host.

Since many of us are given free Shared SSL with our shared hosting plans and have no further need for a dedicated IP, I decided to modify the Secure-Admin code to cater for those that wanted to add SSL security without the need for extra requirements. (more…)

Managing tasks whilst maintaining productivity can often feel like an uphill struggle. Over the years, I’ve refined the way I like to work and found I am most productive when working from a single list of tasks.

The order of my tasks depicts the priority. This means that, once my tasks are ordered correctly, all I need to do is work my way down the list from the first item.

ActiveCollab has provided me with a great set of tools to manage projects. However, I feel the current version (0.71) lacks an efficient way of managing tasks and doesn’t provide a single combined list from ALL projects. This, coupled with the fact that I’ve been yearning for a drag and drop sortable list has driven me to hack activeCollab’s My Tasks page and add a new feature that I’ve called ‘Prioritask’. (more…)

I’ve been looking for an open source application that I can use to manage my projects and after a review of the current popular options I’ve chosen activeCollab. ActiveCollab is written by Ilija Studen who based the system on Basecamp, 37Signals’ popular project management and collaboration tool.

After I installed and became acquainted with the system I realised that it was lacking something that I needed urgently; the ability to attach a thread of comments to individual tasks for the purpose of issue tracking. (more…)

Up until yesterday Haris.tv was using a plugin that provided visitors with an array of social bookmarking options that I decided, on review, was cluttering up the page layout. I chose to scrap it in favour of a cleaner and simpler design.

I wanted to provide visitors with a quick and easy method of sharing articles on Haris.tv but at the same time I didn’t want to clutter the layout.